frustrating…

Posted In: Everyday life — January 25, 2005 @ 10:36 pm — Peter

Today was a crummy day… The system I worked on this past weekend is bowing under the pressure of the additional users that have been added to it. Today, our network was plagued by erratic behavior. The behavior was initially attributed to a virus, however, I continued to have problems with the bill pay system after the infected workstations were cleaned. Twice, IIS had crashed and all the sites were stopped. I was stumped at this point and suspected the web server may have a virus. I quickly installed the Trend Server Protect software, no virus was found… I spent the rest of the day harassing Dennis and Craig about the network, figuring something was causing the traffic between the web application server and mainframe to be periodically dropped. I should have contacted the software vendor sooner, since they seem to have some ideas about the problem. We had talked weeks ago about CICS sockets on the OS390 mainframe and how many would be required to support our userbase. The conversation ended with the experts feeling we had more than enough and it should not be an issue, but we should keep it in mind as our userbase grows. To have this be a problem now is quite surprising… Why were they not able to suggest an appropriate socket amount in the first place?!?

So, I was checking my email for the last time this evening and thought I would check my work email to see if anything was going on… To my surprise, I found a scathing email from a Credit Union member blasting us because our site was unavailable. I quickly tested the web app and it was functioning normally. I then spent about an hour debugging various aspects of the system, unable to find anything wrong. This is really frustrating… It seems the person is new to the bill pay system and is unsure as how to use it. Either way, I will work the problem until I figure out exactly what they were experiencing.

I am not too thrilled with being in a systems support role. From my understanding, I will only be the primary support contact until the entire migration effort is complete. After that point, the network operations group will be the primary contact and problems will be escalated to me when they fall outside the routine troubleshooting tasks. Ugh, I should not take the email this Credit Union member sent so personally, but they were pretty harsh. I have worked so hard on this project and to have someone think we are incompetent fools upsets me. I should get some sleep, I have a feeling there will be a conference call early in the morning to get these problems worked out.